@admin
I can't really comment on the legal/trademark perspective, but for me, I only became aware of the fediverse due to Mastodon. Not many are aware that Mastodon is just one implementation of a spec in a larger network, and in some regards that shouldn't matter.

However I honestly probably wouldn't have joined mastodon.tech (which I found via joinmastodon.org) if I had realized that it isn't actually a Mastodon instance per se, as even though it's the same ActivityPub base, I don't think feature parity is/can be guaranteed. And whenever it's brought to my attention that I'm actually on Pleroma and not Mastodon, which is not only when I see posts like this but also everytime I notice the instance in an account's profile, I wonder just a bit if all the features I read up on for Mastodon are available to me here, and if this will be the case years down the line. I also think about long-term instance persistence in general and how a reoccurence of mastodon.technology can be avoided/mitigated without having to host my own instance, but that's another matter. There's just this strange disconnect for me in being at mastodon.tech, but it not actually being Mastodon when that's what I - thought I - signed up for.

@kimiamania @distrotube